Barry Charles Scheck (born September 19, 1949) is an American attorney and legal scholar. He received national media attention while serving on O. J. Simpson's defense team, collectively dubbed the "Dream Team", helping to win an acquittal in the highly publicized murder case. Scheck is the director of the Innocence Project and a professor at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.

Scheck was born in Queens, New York, in a Jewish family and grew up in the village of Flower Hill, New York, located near Port Washington. He graduated from the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York in 1967. He went on to receive a B.A. from Yale University in 1971 (majoring in Economics and American Studies) and a Master of City Planning (M.C.P.) and Juris Doctor (J.D.) from University of California, Berkeley, in 1974.

Scheck was the personal lawyer for the Hedda Nussbaum case, in 1987. He both defended her and assisted in getting the charges against her dropped, while also assisting in ensuring Joel Steinberg's arrest and suing him in the civil case Nussbaum vs. Steinberg. Scheck was part of the team that defended O. J. Simpson in his 1995 trial. He was associated with the clearing in 1999 of Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson who had spent 11 years in prison of wrongful murder convictions. He was lead lawyer who defended British au pair Louise Woodward in her 1997 murder trial.

More recently, he served as attorney of the wrongly accused Duke University lacrosse player Reade Seligmann to represent him in a civil lawsuit filed on October 5, 2007, against the city of Durham, North Carolina, and its former district attorney, Mike Nifong. He also was responsible for clearing John Restivo, Dennis Halstead, and John Kogut after 18 years in prison for the 1985 Lynbrook rape and murder of Theresa Fusco, when DNA evidence proved them innocent and implicated others.

Jurors Cooley, Bess, and Rubin-Jackson wrote in A Rush to Judgement? that Barry Scheck was the most persuasive attorney at the trial. However, Vincent Bugliosi, Darnel M. Hunt, Daniel M. Petrocelli, and defense witness Henry Lee all wrote that Scheck made many factually false claims about the physical evidence. Lee wrote in Blood Evidence: How DNA is Revolutionizing the Way We Solve Crimes (2003) that both of the defense's forensic DNA experts, Lee and Edward Blake, had rejected Scheck's argument that the mistakes made during evidence collection rendered the results unreliable and his contamination claim. Hunt wrote in O. J. Simpson Facts and Fictions: News Rituals in the Construction of Reality that Scheck "floated ridiculous conspiracy theories to the jury". Jeffrey Toobin wrote in The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson that "Scheck's arguments presupposed a conspiracy so immense within the LAPD that, analyzed objectively, it seemed a practical impossibility."

Scheck argued that 100% of the DNA from the evidence samples was lost due to bacterial degradation because the swatches were collected and packaged in plastic bags, not paper bags as recommended, and then stored in a police van without being refrigerated for up to seven hours. The evidence samples were then cross-contaminated with DNA from Simpson, Nicole Brown, and Ron Goldman's reference vial being transferred to all but three evidence items. Scheck also argued the remaining three exhibits were planted by police and thus fraudulent. Lee wrote in Blood Evidence that most of the blood evidence was sent directly to the consulting labs and not the LAPD crime lab, where Scheck alleged the evidence was contaminated. Since all of the samples the consulting labs received were testable despite none of those samples having been "contaminated" in the LAPD crime lab, that conclusively disproves Scheck's claim that 100% of the DNA had been lost due to degradation because those samples should have been inconclusive. Lee writes that this also effectively refutes the contamination claim as well because if the evidence samples were not 100% degraded and were contaminated with Simpson's DNA in the LAPD crime lab, the result would be a mixture of Simpson's DNA and the real killer's DNA but the results only showed Simpson's DNA was present.

Lee wrote in Blood Evidence that Scheck's entire contamination claim was summarized by "high" DNA from the reference vials being accidentally transferred to the "low" DNA found in the extraction product, that was then amplified producing erroneous results. He made three arguments for how this allegedly happened, none of which had any merit: contamination from the reagents used for amplification; cross-contamination from the reference vials to the dna extraction product and contamination from PCR carryover amplification. In the first case, Scheck claimed that contamination could have happened if the reagents used for Amplification were contaminated from repeated use with the reference blood but his witness admitted that all of the reagents used had tested negative for contamination. In the second case, Scheck alleged that the victims blood in Simpson's Bronco could be the result of cross-contamination from the reference vials ("High" DNA) to the evidence samples ("Low" DNA) if they were extracted first but again Scheck's witness conceded that the evidence samples were actually extracted first before the reference samples, eliminating that possibility. Scheck's witness also admitted that because two separate DNA labs collected blood from the same spot in the Bronco independently and both returned the same matches, that proves they weren't contaminates. The last argument for contamination — from PCR carryover application — happened allegedly when Yamauchi took the PCR extraction product ("Low DNA") to the PCR amplification room which was in "the same location" as the evidence locker ("High" DNA) which would be a high risk for contamination. However, Scheck's witness "conceded the PCR extraction product was not returned to the specific area near the extraction room or evidence-handling area but was taken to a completely separate area located a comfortable distance away making a contamination scenario highly improbable". M. L. Rantala wrote in OJ Unmasked that Scheck implied the evidence locker was in the PCR amplification room so his contamination claim would be plausible but opined that he was being deceptive because he had toured the lab and knew that wasn't true.

Petrocelli also noted in Triumph of Justice that Scheck's witness John Gerdes lied when he said that Collin Yamauchi admitted spilling Simpson's blood in the lab presumably so the defense could imply that contamination could have happened that way as well.